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the primary benefit of a diary as a purely pragmatic record of your workday productivity and progress — while most dedicated diarists would counter that the core benefits are spiritual and psychoemotional — it does offer some valuable insight into the psychology of how journaling elevates our experience of everyday life:

We can’t, however, simply will ourselves into better habits. Since willpower is a limited resource, whenever we’ve overexerted our self-discipline in one domain, a concept known as “ego depletion” kicks in and renders us mindless automata in another

the key to changing a habit is to invest heavily in the early stages of habit-formation so that the behavior becomes automated and we later default into it rather than exhausting our willpower wrestling with it. Young also cautions that it’s a self-defeating strategy to try changing several habits at once. Rather, he advises, spend one month on each habit alone before moving on to the next

a diary boosts your creativity

This is one of the most important reasons to keep a diary: it can make you more aware of your own progress, thus becoming a wellspring of joy in your workday.

The second reason is focalism. When we contemplate failure from afar, according to Gilbert and Wilson, we tend to overemphasize the focal event (i.e., failure) and overlook all the other episodic details of daily life that help us move on and feel better. The threat of failure is so vivid that it consumes our attention

the authors point to a pattern that reveals the single most important motivator: palpable progress on meaningful work: On the days when these professionals saw themselves moving forward on something they cared about — even if the progress was a seemingly incremental “small win” — they were more likely to be happy and deeply engaged in their work. And, being happier and more deeply engaged, they were more likely to come up with new ideas and solve problems creatively.

Although the act of reflecting and writing, in itself, can be beneficial, you’ll multiply the power of your diary if you review it regularly — if you listen to what your life has been telling you. Periodically, maybe once a month, set aside time to get comfortable and read back through your entries. And, on New Year’s Day, make an annual ritual of reading through the previous year.

This, they suggest, can yield profound insights into the inner workings of your own mind — especially if you look for specific clues and patterns, trying to identify the richest sources of meaning in your work and the types of projects that truly make your heart sing. Once you understand what motivates you most powerfully, you’ll be able to prioritize this type of work in going forward. Just as important, however, is cultivating a gratitude practice and acknowledging your own accomplishments in the diary:

Fields argues that if we move along the Uncertainty Curve either too fast or too slowly, we risk either robbing the project of its creative potential and ending up in mediocrity. Instead, becoming mindful of the psychology of that process allows us to pace ourselves better and master that vital osmosis between freedom and constraint.

Schwalbe reminds us of the “impact bias” — our tendency to greatly overestimate the intensity and extent of our emotional reactions, which causes us to expect failures to be more painful than they actually are and thus to fear them more than we should.

When we think about taking a risk, we rarely consider how good we will be at reframing a disappointing outcome. In short, we underestimate our resilience.

what you do every day is best seen as an iceberg, with a small fraction of conscious decision sitting atop a much larger foundation of habits and behaviors.

don’t let yourself forget that the good life, the meaningful life, the truly fulfilling life, is the life of presence, not of productivity.

Sea levels have risen eight inches since 1870, according to the new report, which projects a further rise of one to four feet by the end of the century. Waters around southeast Florida could surge up to two feet by 2060, according to a report by the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact. A study by the Florida Department of Transportation concluded that over the next 35 years, rising sea levels will increasingly flood and damage smaller local roads in the Miami area.

What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: "It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience."

There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry.

In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production.

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places.

The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one’s person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one’s own personhood.

knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world.

we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities

Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the "real world."

“Each negative event a person faces leads to an attempt to cope, which forces people to learn about their own capabilities, about their support networks — to learn who their real friends are. That kind of learning, we think, is extremely valuable for subsequent coping,” up to a point.

A subset of the participants, 194, reported that they had experienced not one of the fairly comprehensive list of 37 events on the survey. “We wondered: Who are these people who have managed to go through life with nothing bad happening to them?”

Dr. Cohen Silver said. “Are they hyper-conscientious? Socially isolated? Just young? Or otherwise unique?” They weren’t, the researchers found. Stranger still, they were not the most satisfied with their lives. Their sense of well-being was about the same, on average, as people who had suffered up to a dozen memorable blows.

It was those in the middle, those reporting two to six stressful events, who scored highest on several measures of well-being, and who showed the most resilience in response to recent hits.

Taken together, these findings suggest that we may be innately predisposed to have certain theories about the natural world that are resilient to being drastically replaced or restructured.

hile some theories of learning consider the unschooled mind to be a ‘bundle of misconceptions’ in need of replacement, perhaps replacement is an unattainable goal. Or, if it is attainable, we may need to rethink how science is taught.

30 years ago, he says he saw plenty of “dowagers’ humps, where the upper back had frozen into a forward curve, in grandmothers and great-grandmothers.” Now he says he’s seeing the same stoop in teenagers.

When we’re sad, we slouch. We also slouch when we feel scared or powerless. Studies have shown that people with clinical depression adopt a posture that eerily resembles the iHunch.

Posture doesn’t just reflect our emotional states; it can also cause them.

assigned non-depressed participants to sit in an upright or slouched posture and then had them answer a mock job-interview question, a well-established experimental stress inducer, followed by a series of questionnaires. Compared with upright sitters, the slouchers reported significantly lower self-esteem and mood, and much greater fear.

Posture affected even the contents of their interview answers: Linguistic analyses revealed that slouchers were much more negative in what they had to say. The researchers concluded, “Sitting upright may be a simple behavioral strategy to help build resilience to stress.”

Slouching can also affect our memory

clinical depression, participants were randomly assigned to sit in either a slouched or an upright position and then presented with a list of positive and negative words. When they were later asked to recall those words, the slouchers showed a negative recall bias (remembering the bad stuff more than the good stuff), while those who sat upright showed no such bias.

Japanese schoolchildren, those who were trained to sit with upright posture were more productive than their classmates in writing assignments.

We found that the size of the device significantly affected whether subjects felt comfortable seeking out the experimenter, suggesting that the slouchy, collapsed position we take when using our phones actually makes us less assertive — less likely to stand up for ourselves when the situation calls for it.

In fact, there appears to be a linear relationship between the size of your device and the extent to which it affects you: the smaller the device, the more you must contract your body to use it, and the more shrunken and inward your posture, the more submissive you are likely to become.

Keep your head up and shoulders back when looking at your phone, even if that means holding it at eye level.

Your physical posture sculpts your psychological posture, and could be the key to a happier mood and greater self-confidence.

Sartre listened to his problem and said simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.’ No signs are vouchsafed in this world, he said. None of the old authorities can relieve you of the burden of freedom. You can weigh up moral or practical considerations as carefully as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.

Even if the situation is unbearable — perhaps you are facing execution, or sitting in a Gestapo prison, or about to fall off a cliff — you are still free to decide what to make of it in mind and deed. Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.

The war had made people realise that they and their fellow humans were capable of departing entirely from civilised norms; no wonder the idea of a fixed human nature seemed questionable.

If this sounds difficult and unnerving, it’s because it is. Sartre does not deny that the need to keep making decisions brings constant anxiety. He heightens this anxiety by pointing out that what you do really matters. You should make your choices as though you were choosing on behalf of the whole of humanity, taking the entire burden of responsibility for how the human race behaves. If you avoid this responsibility by fooling yourself that you are the victim of circumstance or of someone else’s bad advice, you are failing to meet the demands of human life and choosing a fake existence, cut off from your own ‘authenticity’.

Along with the terrifying side of this comes a great promise: Sartre’s existentialism implies that it is possible to be authentic and free, as long as you keep up the effort.

almost all agreed that it was, as an article in Les nouvelles littéraires phrased it, a ‘sickening mixture of philosophic pretentiousness, equivocal dreams, physiological technicalities, morbid tastes and hesitant eroticism … an introspective embryo that one would take distinct pleasure in crushing’.

he offered a philosophy designed for a species that had just scared the hell out of itself, but that finally felt ready to grow up and take responsibility.

In this rebellious world, just as with the Parisian bohemians and Dadaists in earlier generations, everything that was dangerous and provocative was good, and everything that was nice or bourgeois was bad.

Such interweaving of ideas and life had a long pedigree, although the existentialists gave it a new twist. Stoic and Epicurean thinkers in the classical world had practised philosophy as a means of living well, rather than of seeking knowledge or wisdom for their own sake. By reflecting on life’s vagaries in philosophical ways, they believed they could become more resilient, more able to rise above circumstances, and better equipped to manage grief, fear, anger, disappointment or anxiety.

In the tradition they passed on, philosophy is neither a pure intellectual pursuit nor a collection of cheap self-help tricks, but a discipline for flourishing and living a fully human, responsible life.

For Kierkegaard, Descartes had things back to front. In his own view, human existence comes first: it is the starting point for everything we do, not the result of a logical deduction. My existence is active: I live it and choose it, and this precedes any statement I can make about myself.

Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to escape or transcend ourselves. But it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence.

What was needed, he felt, was not high moral or theological ideals, but a deeply critical form of cultural history or ‘genealogy’ that would uncover the reasons why we humans are as we are, and how we came to be that way. For him, all philosophy could even be redefined as a form of psychology, or history.

For those oppressed on grounds of race or class, or for those fighting against colonialism, existentialism offered a change of perspective — literally, as Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest.

She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.

the existentialists inhabited their historical and personal world, as they inhabited their ideas. This notion of ‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre and was an early adopter of existentialism

What is existentialism anyway?

An existentialist who is also phenomenological provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on describing lived experience as it presents itself. — By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of living more authentic lives.

Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence. — They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free — — and therefore I’m responsible for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes — an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself.

On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown. — Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds. — Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by borders and yet transcendent and exhilarating. —

The first part of this is straightforward: a phenomenologist’s job is to describe. This is the activity that Husserl kept reminding his students to do. It meant stripping away distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what he called the ‘things themselves’. We must fix our beady gaze on them and capture them exactly as they appear, rather than as we think they are supposed to be.

Husserl therefore says that, to phenomenologically describe a cup of coffee, I should set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations. Then I can concentrate on the dark, fragrant, rich phenomenon in front of me now. This ‘setting aside’ or ‘bracketing out’ of speculative add-ons Husserl called epoché — a term borrowed from the ancient Sceptics,

The point about rigour is crucial; it brings us back to the first half of the command to describe phenomena. A phenomenologist cannot get away with listening to a piece of music and saying, ‘How lovely!’ He or she must ask: is it plaintive? is it dignified? is it colossal and sublime? The point is to keep coming back to the ‘things themselves’ — phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage — so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the heart of the experience.

Husserlian ‘bracketing out’ or epoché allows the phenomenologist to temporarily ignore the question ‘But is it real?’, in order to ask how a person experiences his or her world. Phenomenology gives a formal mode of access to human experience. It lets philosophers talk about life more or less as non-philosophers do, while still being able to tell themselves they are being methodical and rigorous.

Besides claiming to transform the way we think about reality, phenomenologists promised to change how we think about ourselves. They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is, as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does, and how it grasps its experiences.

For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote: in love, something is loved, in hatred, something is hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn’t there, my mental structure is still one of ‘about-ness’ or ‘of-ness’.

Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness: it has ‘intentionality’. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy.

Husserl saw in the idea of intentionality a way to sidestep two great unsolved puzzles of philosophical history: the question of what objects ‘really’ are, and the question of what the mind ‘really’ is. By doing the epoché and bracketing out all consideration of reality from both topics, one is freed to concentrate on the relationship in the middle. One can apply one’s descriptive energies to the endless dance of intentionality that takes place in our lives: the whirl of our minds as they seize their intended phenomena one after the other and whisk them around the floor,

Understood in this way, the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is:

Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake — and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of its sleep.

a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about nothing can hardly be said to be a mind at all.

Three simple ideas — description, phenomenon, intentionality — provided enough inspiration to keep roomfuls of Husserlian assistants busy in Freiburg for decades. With all of human existence awaiting their attention, how could they ever run out of things to do?

For Sartre, this gives the mind an immense freedom. If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined ‘inner nature’ can hold us back. We are protean.

way of this interpretation. Real, not real; inside, outside; what difference did it make? Reflecting on this, Husserl began turning his phenomenology into a branch of ‘idealism’ — the philosophical tradition which denied external reality and defined everything as a kind of private hallucination.

For Sartre, if we try to shut ourselves up inside our own minds, ‘in a nice warm room with the shutters closed’, we cease to exist. We have no cosy home: being out on the dusty road is the very definition of what we are.

One might think that, if Heidegger had anything worth saying, he could have communicated it in ordinary language. The fact is that he does not want to be ordinary, and he may not even want to communicate in the usual sense. He wants to make the familiar obscure, and to vex us. George Steiner thought that Heidegger’s purpose was less to be understood than to be experienced through a ‘felt strangeness’.

He takes Dasein in its most ordinary moments, then talks about it in the most innovative way he can. For Heidegger, Dasein’s everyday Being is right here: it is Being-in-the-world, or In-der-Welt-sein. The main feature of Dasein’s everyday Being-in-the-world right here is that it is usually busy doing something.

Thus, for Heidegger, all Being-in-the-world is also a ‘Being-with’ or Mitsein. We cohabit with others in a ‘with-world’, or Mitwelt. The old philosophical problem of how we prove the existence of other minds has now vanished. Dasein swims in the with-world long before it wonders about other minds.

Sometimes the best-educated people were those least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last. Karl Jaspers was one of those who made this mistake, as he later recalled, and Beauvoir observed similar dismissive attitudes among the French students in Berlin.

In any case, most of those who disagreed with Hitler’s ideology soon learned to keep their view to themselves. If a Nazi parade passed on the street, they would either slip out of view or give the obligatory salute like everyone else, telling themselves that the gesture meant nothing if they did not believe in it. As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm — yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them.

for Arendt, if you do not respond adequately when the times demand it, you show a lack of imagination and attention that is as dangerous as deliberately committing an abuse. It amounts to disobeying the one command she had absorbed from Heidegger in those Marburg days: Think!

‘Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents.’ Haffner thought modernity itself was partly to blame: people had become yoked to their habits and to mass media, forgetting to stop and think, or to disrupt their routines long enough to question what was going on.

Heidegger’s former lover and student Hannah Arendt would argue, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, that totalitarian movements thrived at least partly because of this fragmentation in modern lives, which made people more vulnerable to being swept away by demagogues. Elsewhere, she coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the most extreme failures of personal moral awareness.

His communicative ideal fed into a whole theory of history: he traced all civilisation to an ‘Axial Period’ in the fifth century BC, during which philosophy and culture exploded simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as though a great bubble of minds had erupted from the earth’s surface. ‘True philosophy needs communion to come into existence,’ he wrote, and added, ‘Uncommunicativeness in a philosopher is virtually a criterion of the untruth of his thinking.’

The idea of being called to authenticity became a major theme in later existentialism, the call being interpreted as saying something like ‘Be yourself!’, as opposed to being phony. For Heidegger, the call is more fundamental than that. It is a call to take up a self that you didn’t know you had: to wake up to your Being. Moreover, it is a call to action. It requires you to do something: to take a decision of some sort.

Being and Time contained at least one big idea that should have been of use in resisting totalitarianism. Dasein, Heidegger wrote there, tends to fall under the sway of something called das Man or ‘the they’ — an impersonal entity that robs us of the freedom to think for ourselves. To live authentically requires resisting or outwitting this influence, but this is not easy because das Man is so nebulous. Man in German does not mean ‘man’ as in English (that’s der Mann), but a neutral abstraction, something like ‘one’ in the English phrase ‘one doesn’t do that’,

for Heidegger, das Man is me. It is everywhere and nowhere; it is nothing definite, but each of us is it. As with Being, it is so ubiquitous that it is difficult to see. If I am not careful, however, das Man takes over the important decisions that should be my own. It drains away my responsibility or ‘answerability’. As Arendt might put it, we slip into banality, failing to think.

Jaspers focused on what he called Grenzsituationen — border situations, or limit situations. These are the moments when one finds oneself constrained or boxed in by what is happening, but at the same time pushed by these events towards the limits or outer edge of normal experience. For example, you might have to make a life-or-death choice, or something might remind you suddenly of your mortality,

Jaspers’ interest in border situations probably had much to do with his own early confrontation with mortality. From childhood, he had suffered from a heart condition so severe that he always expected to die at any moment. He also had emphysema, which forced him to speak slowly, taking long pauses to catch his breath. Both illnesses meant that he had to budget his energies with care in order to get his work done without endangering his life.

If I am to resist das Man, I must become answerable to the call of my ‘voice of conscience’. This call does not come from God, as a traditional Christian definition of the voice of conscience might suppose. It comes from a truly existentialist source: my own authentic self. Alas, this voice is one I do not recognise and may not hear, because it is not the voice of my habitual ‘they-self’. It is an alien or uncanny version of my usual voice. I am familiar with my they-self, but not with my unalienated voice — so, in a weird twist, my real voice is the one that sounds strangest to me.

Marcel developed a strongly theological branch of existentialism. His faith distanced him from both Sartre and Heidegger, but he shared a sense of how history makes demands on individuals. In his essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, written in 1932 and published in the fateful year of 1933, Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining ‘available’ to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers,

Marcel made it his central existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’.

Bettelheim later observed that, under Nazism, only a few people realised at once that life could not continue unaltered: these were the ones who got away quickly. Bettelheim himself was not among them. Caught in Austria when Hitler annexed it, he was sent first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald, but was then released in a mass amnesty to celebrate Hitler’s birthday in 1939 — an extraordinary reprieve, after which he left at once for America.

we are used to reading philosophy as offering a universal message for all times and places — or at least as aiming to do so. But Heidegger disliked the notion of universal truths or universal humanity, which he considered a fantasy. For him, Dasein is not defined by shared faculties of reason and understanding, as the Enlightenment philosophers thought. Still less is it defined by any kind of transcendent eternal soul, as in religious tradition. We do not exist on a higher, eternal plane at all. Dasein’s Being is local: it has a historical situation, and is constituted in time and place.

For Marcel, learning to stay open to reality in this way is the philosopher’s prime job. Everyone can do it, but the philosopher is the one who is called on above all to stay awake, so as to be the first to sound the alarm if something seems wrong.

Second, it also means understanding that we are historical beings, and grasping the demands our particular historical situation is making on us. In what Heidegger calls ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, Dasein discovers ‘that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up’. At that moment, through Being-towards-death and resoluteness in facing up to one’s time, one is freed from the they-self and attains one’s true, authentic self.

If we are temporal beings by our very nature, then authentic existence means accepting, first, that we are finite and mortal. We will die: this all-important realisation is what Heidegger calls authentic ‘Being-towards-Death’, and it is fundamental to his philosophy.

Hannah Arendt, instead, left early on: she had the benefit of a powerful warning. Just after the Nazi takeover, in spring 1933, she had been arrested while researching materials on anti-Semitism for the German Zionist Organisation at Berlin’s Prussian State Library. Her apartment was searched; both she and her mother were locked up briefly, then released. They fled, without stopping to arrange travel documents. They crossed to Czechoslovakia (then still safe) by a method that sounds almost too fabulous to be true: a sympathetic German family on the border had a house with its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia. The family would invite people for dinner, then let them leave through the back door at night.

As Sartre argued in his 1943 review of The Stranger, basic phenomenological principles show that experience comes to us already charged with significance. A piano sonata is a melancholy evocation of longing. If I watch a soccer match, I see it as a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns to apply their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what I’m seeing, then I am not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all.

Much as they liked Camus personally, neither Sartre nor Beauvoir accepted his vision of absurdity. For them, life is not absurd, even when viewed on a cosmic scale, and nothing can be gained by saying it is. Life for them is full of real meaning, although that meaning emerges differently for each of us.

For Sartre, we show bad faith whenever we portray ourselves as passive creations of our race, class, job, history, nation, family, heredity, childhood influences, events, or even hidden drives in our subconscious which we claim are out of our control. It is not that such factors are unimportant: class and race, in particular, he acknowledged as powerful forces in people’s lives, and Simone de Beauvoir would soon add gender to that list.

Sartre takes his argument to an extreme point by asserting that even war, imprisonment or the prospect of imminent death cannot take away my existential freedom. They form part of my ‘situation’, and this may be an extreme and intolerable situation, but it still provides only a context for whatever I choose to do next. If I am about to die, I can decide how to face that death. Sartre here resurrects the ancient Stoic idea that I may not choose what happens to me, but I can choose what to make of it, spiritually speaking.

But the Stoics cultivated indifference in the face of terrible events, whereas Sartre thought we should remain passionately, even furiously engaged with what happens to us and with what we can achieve. We should not expect freedom to be anything less than fiendishly difficult.

Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free — context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives — for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense.

Nor did he mean that privileged groups have the right to pontificate to the poor and downtrodden about the need to ‘take responsibility’ for themselves. That would be a grotesque misreading of Sartre’s point, since his sympathy in any encounter always lay with the more oppressed side. But for each of us — for me — to be in good faith means not making excuses for myself.

Camus’ novel gives us a deliberately understated vision of heroism and decisive action compared to those of Sartre and Beauvoir. One can only do so much. It can look like defeatism, but it shows a more realistic perception of what it takes to actually accomplish difficult tasks like liberating one’s country.

Camus just kept returning to his core principle: no torture, no killing — at least not with state approval. Beauvoir and Sartre believed they were taking a more subtle and more realistic view. If asked why a couple of innocuous philosophers had suddenly become so harsh, they would have said it was because the war had changed them in profound ways. It had shown them that one’s duties to humanity could be more complicated than they seemed. ‘The war really divided my life in two,’ Sartre said later.

Poets and artists ‘let things be’, but they also let things come out and show themselves. They help to ease things into ‘unconcealment’ (Unverborgenheit), which is Heidegger’s rendition of the Greek term alētheia, usually translated as ‘truth’. This is a deeper kind of truth than the mere correspondence of a statement to reality, as when we say ‘The cat is on the mat’ and point to a mat with a cat on it. Long before we can do this, both cat and mat must ‘stand forth out of concealedness’. They must un-hide themselves.

Heidegger does not use the word ‘consciousness’ here because — as with his earlier work — he is trying to make us think in a radically different way about ourselves. We are not to think of the mind as an empty cavern, or as a container filled with representations of things. We are not even supposed to think of it as firing off arrows of intentional ‘aboutness’, as in the earlier phenomenology of Brentano. Instead, Heidegger draws us into the depths of his Schwarzwald, and asks us to imagine a gap with sunlight filtering in. We remain in the forest, but we provide a relatively open spot where other beings can bask for a moment. If we did not do this, everything would remain in the thickets, hidden even to itself.

The astronomer Carl Sagan began his 1980 television series Cosmos by saying that human beings, though made of the same stuff as the stars, are conscious and are therefore ‘a way for the cosmos to know itself’. Merleau-Ponty similarly quoted his favourite painter Cézanne as saying, ‘The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’ This is something like what Heidegger thinks humanity contributes to the earth. We are not made of spiritual nothingness; we are part of Being, but we also bring something unique with us. It is not much: a little open space, perhaps with a path and a bench like the one the young Heidegger used to sit on to do his homework. But through us, the miracle occurs.

Beauty aside, Heidegger’s late writing can also be troubling, with its increasingly mystical notion of what it is to be human. If one speaks of a human being mainly as an open space or a clearing, or a means of ‘letting beings be’ and dwelling poetically on the earth, then one doesn’t seem to be talking about any recognisable person. The old Dasein has become less human than ever. It is now a forestry feature.

Even today, Jaspers, the dedicated communicator, is far less widely read than Heidegger, who has influenced architects, social theorists, critics, psychologists, artists, film-makers, environmental activists, and innumerable students and enthusiasts — including the later deconstructionist and post-structuralist schools, which took their starting point from his late thinking. Having spent the late 1940s as an outsider and then been rehabilitated, Heidegger became the overwhelming presence in university philosophy all over the European continent from then on.

As Levinas reflected on this experience, it helped to lead him to a philosophy that was essentially ethical, rather than ontological like Heidegger’s. He developed his ideas from the work of Jewish theologian Martin Buber, whose I and Thou in 1923 had distinguished between my relationship with an impersonal ‘it’ or ‘them’, and the direct personal encounter I have with a ‘you’. Levinas took it further: when I encounter you, we normally meet face-to-face, and it is through your face that you, as another person, can make ethical demands on me. This is very different from Heidegger’s Mitsein or Being-with, which suggests a group of people standing alongside one another, shoulder to shoulder as if in solidarity — perhaps as a unified nation or Volk.

For Levinas, we literally face each other, one individual at a time, and that relationship becomes one of communication and moral expectation. We do not merge; we respond to one another. Instead of being co-opted into playing some role in my personal drama of authenticity, you look me in the eyes — and you remain Other. You remain you.

This relationship is more fundamental than the self, more fundamental than consciousness, more fundamental even than Being — and it brings an unavoidable ethical obligation. Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists had being trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. Levinas did more: he turned philosophy around entirely so that these relationships were the foundation of our existence, not an extension of it.

Her last work, The Need for Roots, argues, among other things, that none of us has rights, but each one of us has a near-infinite degree of duty and obligation to the other. Whatever the underlying cause of her death — and anorexia nervosa seems to have been involved — no one could deny that she lived out her philosophy with total commitment. Of all the lives touched on in this book, hers is surely the most profound and challenging application of Iris Murdoch’s notion that a philosophy can be ‘inhabited’.

Other thinkers took radical ethical turns during the war years. The most extreme was Simone Weil, who actually tried to live by the principle of putting other people’s ethical demands first. Having returned to France after her travels through Germany in 1932, she had worked in a factory so as to experience the degrading nature of such work for herself. When France fell in 1940, her family fled to Marseilles (against her protests), and later to the US and to Britain. Even in exile, Weil made extraordinary sacrifices. If there were people in the world who could not sleep in a bed, she would not do so either, so she slept on the floor.

The mystery tradition had roots in Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’. It owed much to the other great nineteenth-century mystic of the impossible, Dostoevsky, and to older theological notions. But it also grew from the protracted trauma that was the first half of the twentieth century. Since 1914, and especially since 1939, people in Europe and elsewhere had come to the realisation that we cannot fully know or trust ourselves; that we have no excuses or explanations for what we do — and yet that we must ground our existence and relationships on something firm, because otherwise we cannot survive.

One striking link between these radical ethical thinkers, all on the fringes of our main story, is that they had religious faith. They also granted a special role to the notion of ‘mystery’ — that which cannot be known, calculated or understood, especially when it concerns our relationships with each other. Heidegger was different from them, since he rejected the religion he grew up with and had no real interest in ethics — probably as a consequence of his having no real interest in the human.

Meanwhile, the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel was also still arguing, as he had since the 1930s, that ethics trumps everything else in philosophy and that our duty to each other is so great as to play the role of a transcendent ‘mystery’. He too had been led to this position partly by a wartime experience: during the First World War he had worked for the Red Cross’ Information Service, with the unenviable job of answering relatives’ inquiries about missing soldiers. Whenever news came, he passed it on, and usually it was not good. As Marcel later said, this task permanently inoculated him against warmongering rhetoric of any kind, and it made him aware of the power of what is unknown in our lives.

As the play’s much-quoted and frequently misunderstood final line has it: ‘Hell is other people.’ Sartre later explained that he did not mean to say that other people were hellish in general. He meant that after death we become frozen in their view, unable any longer to fend off their interpretation. In life, we can still do something to manage the impression we make; in death, this freedom goes and we are left entombed in other’s people’s memories and perceptions.

We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.

The aspects of our existence that limit us, Merleau-Ponty says, are the very same ones that bind us to the world and give us scope for action and perception. They make us what we are. Sartre acknowledged the need for this trade-off, but he found it more painful to accept. Everything in him longed to be free of bonds, of impediments and limitations

Of course we have to learn this skill of interpreting and anticipating the world, and this happens in early childhood, which is why Merleau-Ponty thought child psychology was essential to philosophy. This is an extraordinary insight. Apart from Rousseau, very few philosophers before him had taken childhood seriously; most wrote as though all human experience were that of a fully conscious, rational, verbal adult who has been dropped into this world from the sky — perhaps by a stork.

For Merleau-Ponty, we cannot understand our experience if we don’t think of ourselves in part as overgrown babies. We fall for optical illusions because we once learned to see the world in terms of shapes, objects and things relevant to our own interests. Our first perceptions came to us in tandem with our first active experiments in observing the world and reaching out to explore it, and are still linked with those experiences.

Another factor in all of this, for Merleau-Ponty, is our social existence: we cannot thrive without others, or not for long, and we need this especially in early life. This makes solipsistic speculation about the reality of others ridiculous; we could never engage in such speculation if we hadn’t already been formed by them.

As Descartes could have said (but didn’t), ‘I think, therefore other people exist.’ We grow up with people playing with us, pointing things out, talking, listening, and getting us used to reading emotions and movements; this is how we become capable, reflective, smoothly integrated beings.

In general, Merleau-Ponty thinks human experience only makes sense if we abandon philosophy’s time-honoured habit of starting with a solitary, capsule-like, immobile adult self, isolated from its body and world, which must then be connected up again — adding each element around it as though adding clothing to a doll. Instead, for him, we slide from the womb to the birth canal to an equally close and total immersion in the world. That immersion continues as long as we live, although we may also cultivate the art of partially withdrawing from time to time when we want to think or daydream.

When he looks for his own metaphor to describe how he sees consciousness, he comes up with a beautiful one: consciousness, he suggests, is like a ‘fold’ in the world, as though someone had crumpled a piece of cloth to make a little nest or hollow. It stays for a while, before eventually being unfolded and smoothed away. There is something seductive, even erotic, in this idea of my conscious self as an improvised pouch in the cloth of the world. I still have my privacy — my withdrawing room. But I am part of the world’s fabric, and I remain formed out of it for as long as I am here.

By the time of these works, Merleau-Ponty is taking his desire to describe experience to the outer limits of what language can convey. Just as with the late Husserl or Heidegger, or Sartre in his Flaubert book, we see a philosopher venturing so far from shore that we can barely follow. Emmanuel Levinas would head out to the fringes too, eventually becoming incomprehensible to all but his most patient initiates.

Sartre once remarked — speaking of a disagreement they had about Husserl in 1941 — that ‘we discovered, astounded, that our conflicts had, at times, stemmed from our childhood, or went back to the elementary differences of our two organisms’. Merleau-Ponty also said in an interview that Sartre’s work seemed strange to him, not because of philosophical differences, but because of a certain ‘register of feeling’, especially in Nausea, that he could not share. Their difference was one of temperament and of the whole way the world presented itself to them.

The two also differed in their purpose. When Sartre writes about the body or other aspects of experience, he generally does it in order to make a different point. He expertly evokes the grace of his café waiter, gliding between the tables, bending at an angle just so, steering the drink-laden tray through the air on the tips of his fingers — but he does it all in order to illustrate his ideas about bad faith. When Merleau-Ponty writes about skilled and graceful movement, the movement itself is his point. This is the thing he wants to understand.

We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of the inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. This is the most attractive description of philosophy I’ve ever read, and the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point.

By prioritising perception, the body, social life and childhood development, Merleau-Ponty gathered up philosophy’s far-flung outsider subjects and brought them in to occupy the centre of his thought.

In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France on 15 January 1953, published as In Praise of Philosophy, he said that philosophers should concern themselves above all with whatever is ambiguous in our experience. At the same time, they should think clearly about these ambiguities, using reason and science. Thus, he said, ‘The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity.’ A constant movement is required between these two

As Sartre wrote in response to Hiroshima, humanity had now gained the power to wipe itself out, and must decide every single day that it wanted to live. Camus also wrote that humanity faced the task of choosing between collective suicide and a more intelligent use of its technology — ‘between hell and reason’. After 1945, there seemed little reason to trust in humanity’s ability to choose well.

Merleau-Ponty observed in a lecture of 1951 that, more than any previous century, the twentieth century had reminded people how ‘contingent’ their lives were — how at the mercy of historical events and other changes that they could not control. This feeling went on long after the war ended. After the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many feared that a Third World War would not be long in coming, this time between the Soviet Union and the United States.

For this reason, cultures all around the world have treated emotional touching as something apart. The Greeks labeled the drive to touch with the word “eros,” and they meant something vaster and deeper than just sexual pleasure.

“Animals have sex and human beings have eros, and no accurate science is possible without making this distinction,” Allan Bloom observed.

The Abrahamic religions also treat sex as something sacred and beautiful when enveloped in loving and covenantal protections, and as something disordered and potentially peace-destroying when not.

Over the past 100 years or so, advanced thinkers across the West have worked to take the shame out of sex, surely a good thing. But they’ve also disenchanted it

“One of the principal outcomes of the sexual revolution was to establish that sex is just like any other social interaction — nothing taboo or sacred about it.” Sex is seen as a shallow physical and social thing, not a heart and soul altering thing.

One unintended effect of this disenchantment is that it becomes easy to underestimate the risks inherent in any encounter.

The woman who talked in an online article about her date with Aziz Ansari is being criticized because what happened to her was not like what happened to the victims of Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K

The assumption seems to be that as long as there’s consent between adults, everything else is kosher.

Everything we know about touch suggests that even with full consent, the emotional quality of an encounter can have profound positive or negative effects. If Ansari did treat her coldly or neglectfully, it’s reasonable to think that the shame she felt right after was the surface effect of a deeper wound. Neglectful, dehumanizing sex is not harassment, but it’s some other form of serious harm.

Disenchanting emotional touch also causes people to underestimate the way past experiences shape current behavior.

Agency is learned, not bred. And one of the things that undermines agency most powerfully is past sexual harm.

The abuse of intimacy erodes all the building blocks of agency: self-worth, resiliency and self-efficacy (the belief that you can control a situation).

It is precisely someone who lives within a culture of supposedly zipless encounters who is most likely to be unable to take action when she feels uncomfortable.

I hate the way Babe, which published the story about the Ansari date, violated everybody’s privacy here. But it seems that the beginning of good sense is to take the power of touch seriously, as something that has profound good and bad effects.

It seems that the smarter we get about technology, the dumber we get about relationships. We live in a society in which loneliness, depression and suicide are on the rise.

The guiding moral principle here is not complicated: Try to treat other people as if they possessed precious hearts and infinite souls. Everything else will follow.

“Slang may not represent us at our best, or our most admirable, but it represents us as human beings with anger, fear, self-aggrandisement, and our obsession with sex and bodily parts.”

This clever, playful use of metaphor would come to define anti-languages for Halliday. As you could see from the dialogue between the two Elizabethan ruffians, the strange, nonsensical words render a sentence almost impossible to comprehend for outsiders, and the more terms you have, the harder it is for an outsider to learn the code. It is the reason that selling words to the police can be heavily punished among underworld gangs.

All borrow the grammar of the mother language but replace words (“London”, “purse”, “money”, “alehouse”) with another, elliptical term (“Rome”, “bounge”, “lower”, “bowsing ken”). Often, the anti-language may employ dozens of terms that have blossomed from a single concept – a feature known as “over-lexicalisation”. Halliday points to at least 20 terms that Elizabethan criminals used to describe fellow thieves, for instance

Similarly, the Kolkata underworld had 41 words for police and more than 20 for bomb. Each anti-society may have its own way of generating new terms; often the terms are playful metaphors (such as “bawdy basket”), but they can also be formed from existing words by swapping around or inserting syllables – “face” might become “ecaf”, for instance.

striking similarities in the patois spoken by all three underground groups and the ways it shaped their interactions.

“The better you are, the higher the status between those users,” explains Martin Montgomery, author of An Introduction to Language and Society.

Halliday doubted that secrecy was the only motive for building an anti-language, though; he found that it also helps define a hierarchy within the “anti-society”. Among the Polish prisoners, refusing to speak the lingo could denigrate you to the lowest possible rung of the social ladder, the so-called “suckers”.

The concept of an anti-language throws light on many of the vibrant slangs at the edges of society, from Cockney rhyming slang and Victorian “Gobbledygook” to the “Mobspeak” of the Mafia and “Boobslang” found uniquely in New Zealand prisons. The breadth and range of the terms can be astonishing; a lexicography of Boobslang reaches more than 200 pages, with 3,000 entries covering many areas of life.

Consider Polari. Incorporating elements of criminal cants, the gypsy Romani language, and Italian words, it was eventually adopted by the gay community of early 20th Century Britain, when homosexuality was still illegal. (Taking a “vada” at a “bona omi” for instance, means take a look at the good-looking man). Dropping an innocent term into a conversation would have been a way of identifying another gay man, without the risk of incriminating yourself among people who were not in the know.

His success is a startling illustration of the power of an anti-language to subvert – using the establishment's prudish "Auntie"  to broadcast shocking scenes of gay culture, two years before the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality. The show may have only got the green light thanks to the fact that the radio commissioners either didn’t understand the connotations

the song Girl Loves Me on David Bowie’s latest album was written as a combination of Polari and Nadsat, the fictional anti-language in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

Montgomery thinks we can see a similar process in the lyrics of hip-hop music. As with the other anti-languages, you can witness the blossoming of words for the illegal activities that might accompany gang culture. “There are so many words for firearm, for different kinds of drug, for money,”

Again, the imaginitive terms lend themselve to artistic use. “There’s quite often a playful element you elaborate new terms for old,” Montgomery says. “To use broccoli as a word for a drug – you take a word from the mainstream and convert it to new use and it has semi-humorous twist to it.”

He thinks that the web will only encourage the creation of slang that share some of the qualities of anti-languages; you just need to look at the rich online vocabulary that has emerged to describe prostitution;

new, metaphorical forms of speech will also proliferate in areas threatened by state censorship; already, you can see a dozen euphemisms flourishing in place of every term that is blocked from a search engine or social network.  If we can learn anything from this rich history of criminal cants, it is the enormous resilience of human expression in the face of oppression.

But that hasn’t happened yet. A study published March 10 by the U.N. Environment Program, in partnership with the University of Oxford, found that of the $14.6 trillion committed by governments of the world’s 50 largest economies in 2020, just 2.5% was on programs likely to decrease greenhouse-gas emissions, lower pollution or restoring degraded natural systems.

Based on proportion of GDP, Spain, South Korea, and the U.K. led on green spending during the pandemic—though that is partly because these countries have announced the allocations of greater shares of their recovery plans than most countries so far. But when considering green spending as a proportion of recovery funds so far announced, Denmark, Finland, Germany, France, Norway, and Poland led.

“Trillions in fiscal spending [still to be announced] provide the greatest opportunity in decades to reorient for the future,” it reads. “Citizens, businesses, policy makers, and politicians must hold each other to account to ensure that the opportunity is not wasted.”

“But the job market is going to be constrained, and opportunities to build your life are going to be slimmer.”

there is a tally that experts say is harder to track: the psychological toll of months of isolation and global suffering, which for some has proved fatal.

Mental health experts say prolonged symptoms of depression and anxiety may prompt risky behaviors that lead to self-harm, accidents, or even death, especially among young people.

the psychological fallout of the pandemic could unfold for months, or even years, public health officials say, with young people among the most affected.

“Mental health has become a buzzword during the pandemic, and we need to keep it that way,”

restrictions were hitting disadvantaged groups, including many young people, harder.

“It’s not just people dying in a hospital — it’s people dying inside.”

“They may be tempted to consume more drugs or drink more alcohol, and may have less physical activity, all of which can contribute to symptoms of depression, anxiety and poor sleep.”

‘Depressed? I don’t know what depressed is, I don’t think I am. I feel bored, but I don’t feel depressed,’”

Mr. Remmers said his son’s death was caused by a combination of carbon monoxide poisoning and drugs.

But the pandemic, he added, “provided a context in which things become possible, and which may have otherwise not happened.”

It is unclear, the organization says, whether this is a sign of more people experiencing more suicidal thoughts or symptoms of mental health issues, or if people now feel more comfortable reaching out for help.

“Lockdown put Lily in physical and emotional situations she would never have in normal times,”

“It’s OK for a young child to fall over and let their parents know that their knee hurts,” Ms. Arkwright said. “This same attitude needs to be extended to mental health.”

“Even the need to reach out to a help-line shows resilience,”

scientists have been monitoring the dwindling population of right whales in the North Atlantic.

the animals’ lengths have declined by roughly 7 percent since 1981

“We saw 5 and even 10-year-old whales that were about the size of 2-year-old whales,” Dr. Stewart said. In one case, an 11-year-old whale was the same size as a 1½-year-old whale.

Entanglement in fishing gear is an ever-present threat for the mammals and one of the primary drivers of their decline.

Whales who don’t drown or starve right away will often drag gear for several years.

“What we think is going on here is that dragging these big trailing heaps of gear is creating all this extra drag, which takes energy to pull around, and that’s energy that they would probably otherwise be devoting to growth,

​Smaller right whales are less resilient to climate change as they do not have the nutritional buffer they need to adapt during lean food years,”

the species can hardly afford declines in its birthrate.

“this population has recovered from very small numbers before, so it’s not completely grim.

“If we all were to demand these management changes of our elected officials the situation would change dramatically.”

In a small way babies are learning to predict and anticipate the future.

You can see similar responses throughout the animal kingdom. Give a chimp a raisin and its reward neurons fire. Teach a chimp that pressing a button will bring a raisin, and the chimp’s brain starts to react to the button as if that were the reward. “The process of getting the reward itself becomes rewarding,”

Planning is key to our physical survival. It’s also central to our emotional wellbeing.

Daydreaming, or mind-wandering, as the wonks call it, is part of universal human experience. In 2008 one Harvard study found that people spent nearly half of their waking hours mind-wandering – often about good things.

Imagining a positive outcome is a popular technique to build resilience and confidence in everything from sport to job interviews. Teachers may tell pupils off for daydreaming in lessons but studies show a link between daydreaming and creative thought.

. That’s not the point. It’s our dreams that feed us. We are hardwired to anticipate the future and, with all due respect to the philosophers, to thrill to it.

. The pandemic has reminded us that the joy we take in planning is as valid as the event itself.

When the present is crushing – when lives and economies are being ruined – our imagination offers us a welcome escape. The mind, as Milton put it, is its own place: it can make a hell of heaven, or a heaven of hell. Perhaps we should let it

continued building in high-risk areas had also contributed to the growing losses.Image

Topping the list was Hurricane Laura, which caused $13 billion in damage when it struck Southwestern Louisiana in late August.

The storms caused $43 billion in losses, almost half the total for all U.S. disasters last year.

In addition to the number of storms, the 2020 hurricane season was unusually devastating because climate change is making storms more likely to stall once they hit land

The next costliest category of natural disasters was convective storms, which includes thunderstorms, tornadoes, hailstorms and derechos, and caused $40 billion in losses last year.

Wildfires caused another $16 billion in losses. Last year’s wildfires stood out not just because of the numbers of acres burned or houses destroyed

Homeowners and governments around the United States need to do a better job of making buildings and communities more resilient to natural disasters

“We can’t, as an industry, continue to just collect more and more money, and rebuild and rebuild and rebuild in the same way,” Mr. Griffin said in an interview. “We’ve got to place an emphasis on preventing and reducing loss.”

The single costliest disaster of 2020 was a series of floods that hit China last summer, which according to Munich Re caused $17 billion worth of damage.

Of the $67 billion in losses from natural disasters across Asia last year, only $3 billion, or 4.5 percent, was covered by insurance.

Much of your brain’s activity happens outside your awareness. In every moment, your brain must figure out your body’s needs for the next moment and execute a plan to fill those needs in advance.

The budget for your body tracks resources

Each action that spends resources, such as standing up, running, and learning, is like a withdrawal from your account. Actions that replenish your resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits.

Every thought you have, every feeling of happiness or anger or awe you experience, every kindness you extend and every insult you bear or sling is part of your brain’s calculations as it anticipates and budgets your metabolic needs.

This view of the brain has many implications for understanding human beings. So often, for example, we conceive of ourselves in mental terms, separate from the physical

There is no such thing as a purely mental cause, because every mental experience has roots in the physical budgeting of your body

When an unpleasant thought pops into your head, like “I can’t take this craziness anymore,” ask yourself body-budgeting questions. “Did I get enough sleep last night? Am I dehydrated? Should I take a walk? Call a friend? Because I could use a deposit or two in my body budget.”

I’m suggesting that it’s possible to acknowledge what your brain is actually doing and take some comfort from it. Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting. This perspective, adopted judiciously, can be a source of resilience in challenging times.

deep, evolutionarily ancient mechanism that helps us balance overall cost and benefit.

Second, it may be influenced by uncertainty about the outcome (you never know, it might work out, so why not keep trying?)

have shown that both capuchin monkeys and rhesus macaques are susceptible to the same behavior and that it occurs more often when the monkeys are uncertain about the outcome.

That helps when you're foraging for food, hunting prey, waiting for eggs to hatch, seeking a mate, or building a nest or enclosure.

"They're like my second set of kids," she said.

"Most rounds lasted only 1 second. So if you didn't get a reward after that, it was actually better to quit and start a new round. That would likely get you a treat sooner than if you had kept going."

"They persisted 5 to 7 times longer than was optimal," said Brosnan, "and the longer they had already tried, the more likely they were to complete the entire task."

t suggests that this behavior is likely driven by evolution and deeply embedded across species.

"Monkeys have really quick reaction times on these games," said Brosnan, "so one second to them is actually a long time."

it shows that human capacities like rationalization, or human concerns like not giving up on something we have publicly committed to, are probably not the main drivers of the sunk cost phenomenon.

reminds us that there is sometimes a good reason to give up.

The relationship between TBI and PTSD has garnered increased attention in recent years as studies have shown considerable overlap in risk factors and symptoms,

At 3 months, 77 participants, or 18 percent, had likely PTSD; at 6 months, 70 participants or 16 percent did. All subjects underwent brain imaging after injury.

"MRI studies conducted within two weeks of injury were used to measure volumes of key structures in the brain thought to be involved in PTSD,"

Specifically, smaller volume in brain regions called the cingulate cortex, the superior frontal cortex, and the insula predicted PTSD at 3 months.

Together, the findings suggest that a "brain reserve," or higher cortical volumes, may provide some resilience against PTSD.

they’re a constituency where a less-bigoted-seeming G.O.P. could make substantial inroads, and where even a figure like Trump, if the economy is strong enough and the Democrat seems sufficiently culturally extreme, can at least win enough minority support to keep himself competitive.